A few minutes later, he heard a key in the lock and the door was pushed open. There was a moment’s silence when they saw him, then sharp disagreement outside. A woman tittered. He didn’t move. His guards were escorting a tall woman and a girl, dressed in black with their heads covered, carrying a fresh mattress and a mop and bucket; but evidently they wouldn’t enter with this naked man inside. It was a quandary for the men. After a minute’s discussion, during which the levity of the females and the irritation of the guards increased in equal measure, the older of the two men shoved the mattress into the room and dragged the old one out. He came back and handed James a plastic cup with two ibuprofen and a penicillin capsule.
‘Wake up. Eat now!’
It was dark outside. The older guard put something on the floor, then the door banged shut. There was a warm, rich smell. He turned over and saw a plastic dish containing a red and yellow stew and a steel spoon. Next to it were two ibuprofen, two diazepam, a penicillin capsule and a slice of melon. Room service. Your evening meal will be served with a complimentary portion of fresh fruit. Laughter pattered in his stomach. He examined the food for several minutes, allowing his appetite to wake. Then he clambered over and ate. It felt strange, as if his body had forgotten what to do. When he had finished, he tucked the diazepam into the hem of the yellow curtain, took the other pills, and went to sleep.
Nikolai Kocharian’s first day in Marrakech had started badly. Resolving to at least set eyes on Claude Zender, he’d taken a taxi to Café Zizou – a gruelling journey that entailed a twenty-minute trip to the outskirts of town and a short hurtle round a section of ring road, followed by a tortuous navigation of countless narrow, foul-smelling streets. At last he’d found himself standing under a pink awning decorated with a motif of a pirouetting flamingo; but despite peering through the window of Café Zizou for several minutes, he’d seen no one who resembled the enormously fat arms dealer. A waiter had then come out and asked him if he’d care to sit down at a table. Ignoring Nikolai’s firm refusal, the waiter had persisted – to the point of actually trying to surround him with pieces of café furniture. Nikolai had become angry and found he was clenching his fists. He’d walked quickly away and, realising he had no idea where he was, entered a bank to ask for directions – only to discover that the Riad des Ombres was less than two hundred yards away.
He’d spent the rest of the day drinking beer, prodding suspiciously at the various meals he ordered from room service, and failing to locate the European sports channel promised by the entertainments menu on his undersized TV. And brooding. This was Natalya’s fault. First she’d dragged him to Marrakech, then she’d abandoned him while she went off on some mysterious errand on the far side of the world.
Yet Nikolai could not find it in his heart to be cross with Natalya. Rather, he was terribly impressed that she could conjure up a trip to LA as if it were no more bother than popping to the shops for a newspaper. He was proud of the business he had built – the wretched riffraff of sly bureaucrats and putty-headed thugs who occupied his working life had last year helped him to a profit of nearly two hundred thousand euros – but it was nothing to what Natalya had achieved. While divisional boardrooms wilted before the violence of her intrigues and the immanence of her sexual charms, back in Kiev, Nikolai bored his gang brothers with news of her ascent into the upper echelons of London’s business community. And when she sent him a link to the Arms Trade Gazette report announcing her appointment at Grosvenor – complete with a photograph of her standing proprietorially outside the grandiose stone façade of the company’s Mayfair offices – he printed it off and stuck it on the noticeboard beside his desk, where it had the miraculous effect of dispersing the smell of urine and petrol that rose up from the cold warehouse below.
Natalya’s exemplary career now seemed to be at risk. Nikolai wasn’t quite sure why, but he did not like the sound of Claude Zender. Here was a man who paid off policemen and taxi drivers, hung around at a casino and had the number of a hired killer in his cellphone: such men belonged in his world, not his sister’s. He wished he could meet the fat arms dealer face-to-face and inform him that Natalya was not to be messed with. In Kiev, a threat from Nikolai Kocharian would have been enough. But in Marrakech, nobody knew anything about him. Zender might use his police contacts to have him arrested. The phrase slurping mutton fat in the local jail resonated unpleasantly at the back of his mind.
Perplexity was an unfamiliar state of mind for Nikolai Kocharian, and eventually he could bear it no longer. It was six o’clock. He took a taxi from the line outside the hotel and asked for the Djemaa el Fna.
‘You have a guide, sir?’ the driver asked.
Nikolai shook his head.
‘Please, sir, I find you very good guide. Very good.’
‘No. And take me straight there because I know the way, OK?’
‘You get good carpet, sir, good quality, cheap price.’
‘Just drive the fucking car,’ Nikolai told him, thoroughly disgruntled and already regretting his decision to leave the Riad. The square was empty apart from a handful of tourists being pestered by two young men leading lethargic monkeys on chains, a row of orange-juice sellers and a crowd of boys playing football with a semi-deflated plastic ball. The dust spurted up at their heels as they ran. A huddle of old women in black dress stood by the area where taxis drew up on one side of the square. They shuffled rapidly over as Nikolai got out, and the boys stopped their game and ran to join the ad hoc queue. The women cuffed and jabbed them with their elbows to keep them at the back. Nikolai had been preparing for this. Taking his cue from Nat – how smart that girl was! – he distributed the change from his pocket with gracious Voilàs! until there was none left, upon which he yanked the lining of both trouser pockets out and waggled them like a pair of supernumerary ears.
‘Plus de monnaie!’ he announced.
The boys ran off, shrieking ‘Plus de monnaie! Plus de monnaie!’, and even the solemn faces of the crones broke into smiles. Heartened by the reception of his few words of French, Nikolai crossed to the far side of the square and followed a steady stream of people into the souk.
The maze of alleys swirled with unfamiliar smells – spices sharp and sweet, peppers and aubergines still warm from the fields, the chocolatey scent of wood and leather as he entered a quarter given over to the sale of shoes and bags. Small boys tugged at his shirt; shopkeepers batted them away and took him by the elbow, urging him to examine the kaleidoscope of wares crammed into the narrow booths behind their wooden chairs.
After half an hour of wandering he came to an area full of carpet emporia, milling with anxious tourists and eager guides. He entered a shop and was seized by an old man who sat him on a kelim-covered stool and served him mint tea from a small silver pot. He was thirsty and, setting aside his reservations about the cleanliness of the water, the pot and the old man’s hands, drank off several glasses in succession while the carpet-seller heaved acres of rug over to him, holding up fingers to indicate the prices. Nikolai sipped his tea and looked unimpressed. He knew how to bargain. It was pleasant in the shop, with the little man cajoling him and the scent of mint in his nostrils. Eventually he saw a rug small enough to carry home.
‘Deux mille trois cent dirhams,’ said the man, ‘so very cheap, yes!’
Nikolai produced a bogus laugh and shook his head.
‘Deux mille trois cent,’ the man repeated. ‘You buy. C’est un tapis de toute qualité, voyez, fait à la main en village du Sahara.’
They bargained amiably for a few minutes, then Nikolai had an idea.
‘Je suis ami de Monsieur Zender,’ he said. ‘Vous savez Monsieur Zender, sans doute?’
The old man looked at him, startled, then hung his head and backed away behind a screen at the rear of the shop. Seconds later, a man of about Nikolai’s age with a full beard and large belly tenting his blue robe stood before him.
‘I must say I am so much sorry,’ he said, looking nervously at Nikolai.
‘I did not know you as friend of Monsieur Zender’s, you did not say. Then I would have served you myself. I am so much sorry, Monsieur. . . please, I do not know your name?’
‘Sartorius,’ said Nikolai, giving an alias he sometimes used back home.
‘Monsieur Sarshooz, of course. May I please offer fresh tea?’ He snapped his fingers at the old man, who picked up the tray and carried it off behind the screen.
‘You are liking your visit to the City of the Seven Saints, Monsieur Sarshooz? You stay at La Mamounia, where Monsieur Zender entertains his friends?’
Thrown by the reference to the seven saints and never having heard of La Mamounia, Nikolai pretended to examine the rug the old man had laid at his feet.
‘I am much sorry to ask you this questions,’ said the man. ‘My uncle says you like this beautiful rug. You have very fine eye, I think. It is two thousand dirhams to buy. For you, I give it as a gift.’ He beckoned to a boy lurking at the back of the shop, who rolled up the carpet and started to wrap it in brown paper and string.
‘Thank you,’ said Nikolai, alarmed at the success of his subterfuge. ‘I’ll pay for it. I didn’t come for a free gift. Here—’ He fumbled a wad of dirhams from his pocket and thrust them at his benefactor.
‘Please, Monsieur Sarshooz,’ said the carpet-seller, bowing rapidly. He took the rug from the boy and held it out. Sweat had formed at his temples. ‘Please say to Monsieur Zender that you came to the shop of Abdellatif Choukri and family and he showed you all hospitality, and you will please pass to him my great respects and my great hopes for eternal friendship.’
‘OK,’ said Nikolai, taking the rug and hurrying from the shop. He’d made a bad mistake, he now realised. Zender would want to know the identity of this man who was pretending to be his friend. He looked back over his shoulder as he walked from the souk, already convinced he was being followed.
Chapter Five
James sat upright, heart lolloping. Someone was shouting orders outside. A hard, rancorous voice that rapped against the walls of his room. His sleep had been dream-heavy and confused. It was light, and it took him a moment to work out that this was dawn, that the sun was up. He settled his heartbeat with a few slow breaths, then made his way round to the narrow, barred window. A group of fifteen or so blue-overalled guards had gathered on a patch of open ground beyond the razor wire. The three from the guardpost were walking over to join them.
Another man strode into view – a man of colossal stature dressed in smart black fatigues, face dark beneath the long peak of a military baseball cap. As he approached the wire, the four dogs bounded over and swung their long tails. The big man roared at the trio from the guardpost, and they broke into a jog. Then he marched to the front of the gathering, stood with legs akimbo, arms folded over the slab of his chest. The other men sidled away, leaving a space around him.
The three guards hurried past James’s window. He heard a series of guttural cries behind him. He went over to the door: there was a strip of sunlight showing at the top. He pulled himself up and squinted through into the enclosed yard, where he saw the top of a man’s head, weaving from side to side. A long, heavy blade with a shallow curve now rose slowly into his line of sight, followed by the hilt and the man’s hands wrapped around it. The sword was still for a second, then sliced down. The weaving began again. The man was slightly built and seemed to compensate for his lack of stature by taking exaggeratedly large strides. He swept the sword around him in a series of grand parabolas, now dipping to a crouch, now rising on tiptoe, now spinning so that his black bisht swirled around his knees, revealing a pair of baggy cotton pantaloons beneath. As he moved in and out of view, James saw thin black hair swept back from a short, slanting forehead, and a glistening beard that covered his cheeks right up to the sockets of his eyes: the beard of the man who had Tasered and sapped him in Oran.
He went back to the window. Standing to one side of the crowd of blue-overalled men, conspicuous in his sand-coloured fatigues, was the younger of his two guards; there was no sign of the other. Suddenly everyone turned to watch four more guards arrive. They were leading a chubby, middle-aged man dressed in a crumpled dark blue suit. Their commander boomed an order at one of the men standing near him, who produced a video camera and started filming. The big man then nodded at the escort and they began to hustle their prisoner out into the open.
The man in the suit was barefoot and walked clumsily in the stony sand. One of the guards shoved him sideways into the guard on the other side, who threw him back. The first guard stepped away so that the prisoner fell to the dirt and both guards used their boots on him, with no particular force but in the casual way a boy will kick a discarded drinks can. When they picked him up again his head twisted rapidly from side to side, then he turned and started to stumble towards the watching men. A guard caught him and spun him round.
‘Wrong way, fat bitch!’
As the prisoner’s face turned towards the sun, James recognised the man he had seen waiting outside the café in Oran – the man called Hamed, who had recruited Sarah and set up the house in Wembley. His eyes squinted out of a face darkened by dirt or bruising, and James saw in his abject demeanour the desperation of a man whose instincts are telling him to run but who knows himself incapable of anything more than the most pathetic evasion.
They brought him to a patch of ground thirty yards or so from James’s window and kicked his feet away, then pulled him by the hair into a kneeling position and tore off his jacket and shirt. The guards stepped away and looked back at their commander in the military cap. He turned and – it seemed to James – stared directly at his window. Then he shouted in a voice that rumbled like an underground rockfall:
‘Mansour! The prisoner is ready!’
Mansour was ready, too. He rushed into view from the left and along the arc of razor wire, gripping the sword in both hands, the curved blade pointing back over his shoulder. The dogs cantered alongside him, barking and snarling from behind the barbed coils.
‘You filthy, lazy, useless queer!’ he screamed in Arabic as he pranced towards the kneeling figure, sword now raised high above his head. ‘You foul yourself with your unspeakable lusts so you cannot do Allah’s sacred work, then you beg for mercy like a slut. You are weak, weak, weak!’
He stamped around, brandishing his sword and charging his victim with all manner of depravity.
‘Now you must die, like the dirty whore that you are.’
Hamed folded over and started to squirm in the dust.
‘Get up! Will you not even die with dignity?’
Two guards stepped in and yanked him back up into a kneeling position. Mansour moved forwards and set himself to strike, but Hamed again fell sideways and lay prostrate.
‘Up! It will be worse for you if you do not face me like a man!’
Again the guards positioned him for execution, but again he fell before Mansour could swing his sword. He made as if to slash at his victim on the ground, but then thought better of it and beckoned furiously to the guards. Hamed cowered, the fat quivering at his dirt-speckled waist, then stretched out on his back as the guards approached to drag him up.
The ceremonial execution was in danger of descending into farce. But before the guards could seize their victim’s arms again, he shouted out, in a surprisingly strong voice:
‘What is it, Mansour, am I spoiling your show? What will people say if you cannot carry out an execution properly? I may be an old queer, but at least I’m not a fraud—’
Mansour rushed in and hacked wildly, scattering the guards. The blow cut into Hamed’s shoulder, and he jerked sideways and screamed, a howl of shock that sent a shudder through the watching men. Mansour struck again, two blows in quick succession which sliced into Hamed’s back and clanged audibly against the bone of his ribs. Still he jerked and rolled, screeching at Mansour’s feet.
The audience was agog, riveted by the spectacle of sharpened steel slicing human flesh, by the ease with which blood could be
made to spill from severed veins, by the weight of cuts that could be suffered without bringing death. A fourth swipe glanced off the top of his skull and a gush of blood darkened the dust.
As Mansour prepared to strike again, a tall man of about sixty came up behind him and drew a handgun. A shot cracked out. Hamed’s head jolted and his body went into spasm. Mansour spun round with a shout of rage to find the tall man’s gun pointing at his belly.
‘I congratulate you, Mansour, on your resolution in the face of such behaviour. We cannot force people to die as they should. You may wish to return to your room to pray.’
Mansour stood for a moment, breathing heavily. The man with the gun was very calm, his gaze fixed on Mansour. He wore a smarter version of the sand-coloured uniform worn by James’s two guards, and had enough chevrons on his shoulders to suggest an officer of high rank. The executioner dipped his head a fraction at the officer, who lowered his gun and placed it in the pocket of his jacket, keeping his hand on the butt. He stepped over to Mansour, put an arm round his shoulders and steered him out of sight.
James watched the guards intently. They seemed subdued. The men who had led Hamed to his death stood with their backs to the body, as if it were nothing to do with them.
‘Dismissed! Back to your posts!’ ordered their statuesque commander.
He aimed a blow at the nearest guard, who ducked to avoid it and hurried away. The rest followed, heads bowed before the big man’s basilisk gaze.
James spent the day sleeping, doing t’ai chi, and trying to keep his mind from circling back to the execution they’d staged outside his window. For his benefit, he had to assume. A strip of sunlight from the gap above the door inched across the concrete floor, so fiercely white it seemed it might at any moment start to smoke. His guards brought food at midday. It was odd, James thought, that they wore soldiers’ uniforms, unlike the blue overalls of the other guards, and that they were the only two who watched over him. He extracted a piece of goat-meat and laid it out to dry in the shower room, then hid the steel spoon. The younger guard failed to notice it was missing when he collected the bowl, and James spent an hour meticulously working the last inch of the handle into a tight hook. He’d need another, but it could wait until a few more meals had come and gone. He took the antibiotics they brought him, but the ibuprofen he hid with the diazepam in the hem of the curtain.
Little Sister (A James Palatine Novel) Page 8
